About

Mapping Salt Lake City is a not-for-profit community project based on Rebecca Solnit's book Infinite City, which maps many of the communities and histories that make up San Francisco. Initially the focus of a 2013 nonfiction writing course at the University of Utah taught by Paisley Rekdal, Mapping Salt Lake City has quickly become a city-wide collaboration led by professors, writers and scholars from the University of Utah and Westminster College.

Because a city and its history are not static but a complex network of connections, environment and relationships, the purpose of Mapping Salt Lake City is to create a continually evolving narrative in which community members and scholars, writers and artists can be in dialogue. And because there are always absences in any record of place, we rely on readers to fill in these gaps by writing and submitting their own content. Over the years, as more people add their own stories, Mapping Salt Lake City will change, expand and grow in the same ways that a city might, to become a more inclusive reflection of our community's diverse, and diverging, perspectives.

Interested participants can contribute in a number of ways: by writing a critical, historical or personal essay or by producing a multi-media project about a subject relevant to Salt Lake; by creating a personal city map using mapping technologies such as Google Maps or Google Earth; by drawing their own Salt Lake City using the map found on our site; or by writing for our ongoing project, "This Was Here."

Mapping Salt Lake City also occasionally provides teaching resources and exercises involving creative mapping projects for educators in the Salt Lake City region. For current examples, see our Resources page. We are also interested in meeting with small groups and classes to lead creative mapping workshops. For more info, please contact us.

Our hope is for Mapping Salt Lake City to become an integral site for the community to visit, a place for people to enter the complex conversation about place that has already begun, and that continues to evolve, around Salt Lake City.

As Mapping Salt Lake City is an arts and educational resource, the photos and images on this site are to be used solely for that purpose. Copyright for photo use must be obtained from the relevant institutions.